POLISH LITERATURE
art's sake; he commanded his language and conjured
with it, but he appeared as a prophet and evangelist,
rather than as an artist.
art's sake; he commanded his language and conjured
with it, but he appeared as a prophet and evangelist,
rather than as an artist.
Poland - 1911 - Polish Literature, a Lecture
16 POLISH LITERATURE
distinguished exponent of Slavonic philology in the
University of Berlin.
The Reformation, however volatile its confessional
influence, was the direct cause of the permanent recog-
nition of Polish as a literary language, and by thus dis-
crediting Latin, which was preparing for a series of
fresh triumphs, fruit of the humanistic movement, rather
took the wind out of the sails of the Renaissance.
But the influences of humanism had already been at
work in Poland, and were betrayed by the elegance of
form and diction, as well as by the nobility of thought,
which the authors of the golden age of Polish literature
displayed when they came to write in the vernacular.
Rey wrote a number of didactic and satiric poems, in
the form of conversations between members of different
classes of society, or under such titles as ' mirror ' and
' true representation ' of contemporary morals, of which
they give a vivid and invaluable picture. These poems
are full of the practical philosophy of the time, which
they sugared with an exquisite coating of language,
rhyme, and rhythm, and seasoned with generous doles
of the racy national humour. A gifted musician and
singer, an inveterate huntsman, an indefatigable bon-
viveur, he was able to enjoy to the full that personal
popularity which these bents assured him amongst his
countrymen, devotees of sociability and sport.
An adept in mundane accomplishments, Rey had also
a more serious side to his nature ; his homilies and
adaptations of the New Testament, written to further
the propaganda of the Reformation, were very widely
read, while their style was so admirable that Rey could
claim to be the founder of Polish prose, no less than the
first writer of original Polish verse.
The greatest poetical talent of the golden age was
that of Kochanowski, the first Polish lyrist, and the
most gifted poet of independent Poland. A traveller in
Italy and France, he had come under the influence of
Ariosto and Ronsard, and was stimulated by their
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? POLISH LITERATURE 17
example to create real poetry in his native language.
He was the first of his countrymen to devote himself
whole-heartedly to his art, to look upon the profession
of a man of letters as an honourable calling, and not
merely as a stepping-stone to preferment. Not a genius,
he had heart and imagination, and infallible taste; his
mind was broad, though not profound, and his artistic
sense was highly developed. He was a humorist and
a classic, able to invest his own compositions with the
grace and proportion of those of Rome and of the
Renaissance. A fervent Christian and faithful Catholic,
he was alive to the faults of the hierarchy and preferred
the calm of country life to participation in the con-
fessional battles of the day.
Besides writing pastoral poems, idylls of village life,
at a time when nature still repelled more than it attracted,
he wrote a drama, which, with a classical subject, was
a transparent allegory of the ominous political infirmity
of his country. His best works were a verse adaptation
of the Psalter, and a series of threnodies, written on the
death of his little girl, full of pathetic and poignant
beauty, ranging from expressions of utter despair to
glimpses of reconciliation with the inevitable.
His aesthetic equilibrium, his perfection of form, his
command of metaphor, and his freedom from the classical
swathing-bands that trammelled the school of Ronsard,
won Kochanowski a shoal of imitators, while main-
taining him high above the level any of them ever
reached.
But this age counted a number of other writers who
struck out lines of their own, and each in his way
acquired distinction and fame : such were Bielski the
historian, who performed, in writing his Universal
History in Polish, a feat without precedent, and one
not paralleled till the nineteenth century; Skarga, the
genius of the pulpit and incomparable leader of the
Jesuits in Poland ; Klonowicz, the citizen poet and
moralist ; Orzechowski, the cultured and gifted polemist,
c
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? i8 POLISH LITERATURE
who became a priest, but conscious that the Church
needed reform waged stubborn war on, amongst other
things, the principle of the celibacy of the clergy, his
supreme disregard for which he aptly illustrated by
courageously marrying a wife ; another character of the
time was Count Zamojski, who founded a university on
his own property in the country, surrounded himself
there with a brilliant coterie of authors and thinkers,
and for long eclipsed the seat of learning in the capital.
Quantities of this sixteenth-century literature have been
lost; printing was expensive, fires were common, but
from what remains it is possible to argue the extra-
ordinary spontaneousness of the intellectual develop-
ment, the prevalence and high level of culture in Poland
at that time; this was due in part, no doubt, to the
humanistic currents which penetrated Poland from Italy,
spread on their return to their country by the innumerable
Poles who visited and studied at Padua and at other
Italian universities, due in part too to the Reformation
which reached Poland from Germany and taught the
Poles the value of prose, just as humanism opened their
eyes to the beauty of poetry in their own language.
Yet credit must be given to the ground on which these
seeds fell, to whose growth Poland lent a character
eminently original. No one could maintain that the
literature of Poland's so-called golden age was a purely
national product; it had produced no real genius, it was
always overshadowed and influenced by the literary
tendencies of other countries. Yet it contained much
that was eminently characteristic of Poland, much that
could not have been produced except under the peculiar
conditions of Polish life, facts that militate against its
successful translation into any foreign language. One
of its healthiest and most gratifying characteristics was
the extraordinary sense of corporate civic responsibility
displayed by almost all its representatives; ardent patriots,
anxious to inculcate into their readers their own sense of
duty, they were never weary of exposing the abuses and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 19
conjuring the defects from which their country suffered.
From Kochanowski in his poems to Skarga in his
sermons, one and all were conscious that Poland was
on the wrong tack, that the ship was already entangled
in the Sargasso sea of anarchy from which it was never
to emerge entire; poets and preachers, historians and
pamphleteers echoed the one cry: we are perishing.
This general sense amongst the intellectual classes of
impending calamity to the State, of Poland's inevitable
doom, at a time when jeremiads were really premature,
when Poland was still compact within and formidable
without, are in all the more creditable contrast to the
blind complacency and criminal optimism characteristic
of Polish society throughout the seventeenth and the
first half of the eighteenth centuries, when the country
was actually tottering to disruption.
By the end of the sixteenth century, it is true, the
extinction of the hereditary dynasty of the Jagiellos had
enabled the team of aristocrats and squires to break
through the last traces of royal control which still held
them in nominal check: the nobles had, by making
kingship elective, robbed it of power ; they had hand-
cuffed the peasants to the soil, confined the citizens to
the cities, and made the tenure of any and every office
conditional on ownership of land; they had, with a
delicious sense of paradox, made unanimity a sine qua
non of all fresh legislation, and so rendered nugatory
every attempt at reform, for unanimity was the one
condition which the Poles, the most urbane, gregarious,
and sociable of people, but always coming to fisticuffs
whenever two or three of them were gathered together
in their country's interest, could never attain.
Yet, in spite of this premiation of individuality, this
organized anarchy or rather panarchy, this distorted
conception of democracy, in spite of the enormous in-
crease of wealth and luxury, the backbone of the nation
had not yet been sapped, victories were reported abroad,
intellectual triumphs celebrated at home, while the exist-
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? 20 . POLISH LITERATURE
ence of self-criticism, though exaggerated, showed that
the national mind was healthy, present and alert.
The history of Polish literature in the seventeenth and
first half of the eighteenth centuries is, in spite of the
appearance of occasional and meteoric talents, character-
ized by stagnation and decay. In contrast to the sixteenth
century, of which the chief features were variety and
originality of talent, perfection of language and indepen-
dence of style, the seventeenth century, the age in Poland
of exaggerated individuality in politics, was one of grey
uniformity of intellectual development. The religious
waywardness of the sixteenth was followed by whole-
sale reversion and unbroken fidelity to the mother-Church
in the seventeenth century. The number of people who
took part in literature reached amazing proportions,
but few acquired positions of distinction or command.
Always gifted orators, the Poles now spent their time
in justifying and preserving the disorder by which their
country was distracted, and in defending the miscon-
ceived liberty in which the minority throve, the political
assemblies were flooded with eloquence, society with
endless streams of poetry religious and political, lyric
and historical, epic, didactic, romantic, erotic and pas-
toral, while the air of the cities was filled with quips
and squibs, lampoons and pasquinades. The growing
mania for crests and connections, for heraldry and
genealogy, which grew in importance as great charac-
ters became more rare, for baroque panegyrics, which
became more voluminous in proportion as there was
less to extol, all pointed to intellectual deterioration.
Latin regained ground it had lost, while the habit of
latinizing Polish prose became incurable a style later
dubbed maccaroniism ; linguistic purity was only pre-
served in poetry and in the pulpit.
The people, bemused with easy living, benumbed
with verse and oratory, were yet startled by occasional
and unexpected triumphs in the field, but the endless
wars with Sweden and Turkey, who should have been
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? POLISH LITERATURE 21
Poland's best friends, exhausted the scattered forces of
the country, and prepared the way for the really danger-
ous enemies, Russia and Prussia, unappreciated because
so near at hand, already sharpening their claws in anti-
cipation of the feast.
During the reigns of the Saxon kings in the first half
of the eighteenth century the culture of Polish society
reached its lowest level. Poland, which had always
been behind but had in the beginning of the seven-
teenth century begun to catch up the rest of Europe,
drifted further and further out of the stream of civiliza-
tion. Poland had proclaimed religious tolerance in the
sixteenth century, when the Christians of the rest of
Europe were torturing one another for their beliefs, but
as time went on, became more and more intolerant.
The eighteenth century was in Poland characterized by
religious unity and intellectual monotony. Fighting
and husbandry occupied the people more than art and
literature, while conviviality and the chase filled their
leisure hours. What literature there was, continued on
the same lines ; the vogue of poetry increased when in
the rest of Europe its place was being taken by prose.
Letters became a pastime instead of a profession, little
was published, so carelessness of style resulted, corre-
spondence was carried on in verse, while circumstantial
poems appeared by the hundred and would be occa-
sioned by the most trivial events, a divorce or an
execution. Innumerable panegyrics continued to gratify
the morbid love of heraldry and genealogy ; books of
devotional poetry and of ascetic character multiplied
incessantly, while the more prominent position occupied
by women in society manifested itself in the debut of
numerous authoresses.
Meantime the organized political anarchy, symbolized
in the phrase 'A Pole in his castle's as strong as a
king', and cunningly guaranteed by the neighbouring
powers, resulted in the luxuriant omnipotence of the
great nobles, too selfish and jealous of each other to
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? 22 POLISH LITERATURE
promote or even to permit any reform, in the impoveriza-
tion of the towns and the oppression of the peasants.
Poland was like a garden where none of the fruit-
trees had ever been pruned, whose hundred branches,
unable to submit to the curtailment of a single privilege,
had passed beyond all control ; their exuberant growth
would ever and again produce splendid attitudes and
lines, effects of colour or of shape the more startlingly
picturesque because unorthodox and unprecedented,
which, however, not only overshadowed and devitalized
the rest of the flora, and reduced the gardener to ridicule
and despair, but excited the prejudice and brought
about the officious interference of the neighbours.
These perceived that the continued existence in their
midst of this seminary of liberty, this democratic wilder-
ness, this happy hunting-ground of individual caprice
would mar the tidiness of their own spick-and-span
properties and prevent the consolidation of their harden-
ing autocracies, that on the other hand its distribution
amongst themselves would be a smart piece of business.
So they set to work, their appetite increased as they
ate, till by the end of the century the three empires had
met, and the Polish Commonwealth was no more.
To these facts the society of this chevaleresque
republic awoke when it was too late. With the acces-
sion of the last king of Poland, Stanislas Augustus
Poniatowski, a man as cultured and sprightly as the
Saxon kings had been ponderous and dull, a great
revival of intellectual activity, inspired by the conscious-
ness of imminent ruin, had begun ; but the centre of
political gravity was no longer in Warsaw, it was in
Berlin, the realization of the national danger was post-
humous, and reform of the State no longer possible at
home, because dismemberment had been decided on
abroad.
Filled with the sense of this tragedy, the loss of
political independence, all the more bitter because long
prepared, Polish society had recourse to education and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 23
literature to save what it still could. Under the in-
fluence of French culture, then predominant in Europe,
the complete rehabilitation of the Polish language, in
prose as well as in verse, was finally effected. In the
field of history much lost time had to be made good,
and the King, genuinely interested in the promotion of
literature, was especially energetic in his support of the
historian Naruszewicz. The stage, which had never
been a favourite diversion of the Poles, at length be-
came relatively popular under the direction of the play-
wright Niemcewicz, who took contemporary politics
and morals as the theme of his comedies. The greatest
poet of the age was Krasicki, Bishop of Warmia, the
first since Rey and Kochanowski, excepting Potocki in
the seventeenth century, to make letters his profession
out of love for them and for his country, not from mo-
tives of personal interest.
The bitterness of his satires he mellowed with modera-
tion and indulgence, they were distinguished by objec-
tive sense of humour rather than by subjective irony,
and in an age of shameless corruption he never became
cynical. His stores of invention and observation were
copious, his wit was recognized by his monarch, whom
in his turn he delighted to compliment. Like King
Stanislas, he was unconscious of the political necessi-
ties of the time, and missed the political moment, but
like him he did his best to enlighten his countrymen,
lest political be followed by intellectual captivity. His
lucid thoughts were expressed, except for occasional
relapses into eighteenth-century rococo, concisely and
with admirable precision of diction, while he was master
both of style and of form.
After the declaration of the freedom of the press in
1789 the country, which in spite of its ostensible liberty
had never had any newspapers, was inundated with
political literature. Economic and political rights were
won for the towns by the eminent publicist Kollontaj.
The Education Commission and Society of the Friends
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? 24 POLISH LITERATURE
of Science in Warsaw both developed hectic but invalu-
able activity, to which the valorous maintenance of
intellectual independence in the nineteenth century, in
spite of calamity on calamity in the field of politics, can
be directly traced. Men of fortune, for the first time
alive to the wealth of their own literature, were seized
with bibliomania, and none too soon ; for much was
already lost, and little space remained to save what was
left. To appreciate the meaning of the partition of
Poland it is necessary to imagine America in possession
of Ireland, and Great Britain divided between France
and Germany, to imagine books and newspapers pub-
lished in the South of England prohibited in the rest of
the kingdom, and all English schools and universities
North of the Trent abolished, in Ireland none but
Americans qualified to buy land, and in Scotland, the
North and Midlands only Germans allowed to build
houses. Under these circumstances it would be com-
prehensible that all who cared for their country should
turn their attention to education and literature, the only
means of maintaining intellectual independence, and of
keeping the flame of nationality alive. It is this dire
need that inspired the great Polish poets of the nine-
teenth century, this consciousness that their literature
occupies a unique place amongst those of Europe, for
while in other countries literature is but one of the
factors of the national life, in Poland it and the language
in which it is expressed are the bond that still keeps the
disjected fragments of the people morally united, are
the one sanctuary where expressions of national feeling
may still take refuge and that not always.
The extraordinarily spontaneous and prolific revival
which took place in the second half of the eighteenth
century came to a sudden end in 1795 ; what with the
completion of the partition, the establishment of censor-
ships, the French Revolution, the defeat of Austria and
Germany by Napoleon, his campaign against Russia,
and all the hopes and fears which these kaleidoscopic
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? POLISH LITERATURE 25
changes generated amongst the Poles, the times were
too harassing and troublous to permit people reading
anything but despatches and gazettes. After Moscow
and Waterloo, when the hopes of the resuscitation of
Poland had been disappointed, Warsaw, in the centre
of the largest and most prosperous of the three divisions
into which the country had been cut up, again became
the national focus, the literary cynosure. Posen was
too detached and commercial ; Galicia, before Magenta
and Solferino, Sadowa and Koeniggraetz had taught
Austria of what she was made, still abandoned to the
caprice of Vienna, was then, in contrast to the present
day, a sort of Polish backwoods. But the revival that
took place in Warsaw was, for the moment, only an
aftermath of what had gone before ; the eighteenth
century and its criteria had vanished from Western
Europe, but continued in Poland to lead a peaceful
backwater existence, with its paraphernalia of powdered
shepherdesses, periwigs and minuets.
Only one remarkable talent stands out from this
rather monotonous background, that of the comedian
Count Fredro. He began his career in Lemberg, but
soon moved to and settled in the more responsive
atmosphere of Warsaw. Careless of his themes and
their development, he was unsurpassed in his handling
of witty dialogue, and his aphorisms are household
words to-day wherever Polish is spoken. Besides
highly amusing farces, a historical comedy and melo-
dramas, he achieved great success with his character^
comedies, in which the Lovelaces and shrews, prigs and
xenomaniacs, misers and grumblers, though inspired by
foreign models, are all impregnated with downright
Polish spirit, which appears not only in their speech,
but in their thoughts and actions, reckless and incon-
sequent, good-humoured and urbane, witty and to the
point, receptive and alert.
This period is also characterized by a general seculari-
zation and democratization of literature, panegyrics
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? 26 POLISH LITERATURE
became obsolete, there was no court, and therefore no
court poets, the vogue of moralizing and didactic poems
had gone, and literature became a profession instead of
a pastime, from being a distraction became a necessity.
And now even the most inveterate classics could no
longer anaesthetize their senses to the vibrations of
romanticism which Scott and Byron, Goethe and
Schiller were transmitting over Europe. The stereo-
typed repetitions of classical models could no longer
satisfy the craving for the novel, the individual, the
national, the supernatural, the romantic. In supplying
this demand Lithuania was to play to Poland the part
of Scotland to England ; Lithuania, like Scotland, had
furnished the neighbouring country with its dynasty
and its territory, a fact which was never allowed to be
forgotten, and was now, remoter and wilder than Poland,
with a polonized upper but untouched lower class, to
supply not only material for romance, but Poland's
greatest writer himself, Mickiewicz. A native of Black
Russia, on the borders of Lithuania, he spent a normal
childhood at home and passed through Vilna University.
His first poems, a book of ballads and romances
published in 1822, erotic in character, were partly
occasioned by a disappointment of the affections, and
by their marked vein of personality and introspection,
a novelty in Polish letters, at once aroused comment.
This was followed by a more ambitious work, ' Dziady '
(' The grandfathers '), a fantastic drama in a popular
framework, with a background of Lithuanian and White
Russian folk-lore, and all the essential adjuncts of
Romanticism, a work which, full of splendid episodes,
lacks unity. One of his finest lyrical outbursts is the
' Ode to Youth ', a challenge of triumphant youth, all-
pervading and all-conquering, to ossifying routine and
humdrum worldliness. His inspiration was sincere
and profound, his instinct and taste infallible, his per-
sonality passionate and convincing, while his language
was novel, daring, and polychrome; his facility and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 27
versatility baffled a thousand imitators, and bewildered
the criticasters of Warsaw. He visited Petersburg and
Moscow, where he imbibed experience and was made
much of in society; from Odessa, where he was sent
to teach, he brought back a series of oriental cameo-
sonnets descriptive of land- and sea-scape, wreck and
storm, sunshine and colour, joy and sorrow in the
Crimea, that called forth general amazement and ad-
miration. Another dramatic poem, ' Konrad Wallen-
rod/ celebrated the cunning triumph in the middle
ages of Lithuanian patriotism over the aggressive
Teutonic Knights, and though of unequal propor-
tions, contains numberless details of perfect workman-
ship. He went abroad in 1829 and never returned to
his country, which in two years from then was over-
taken by the consequences of the ill-judged and fatal
revolution of 1831. What had been left of Polish liberty
was swept away, and ten thousand of the flower of the
nation went into voluntary exile in France, without lay-
ing down their arms, never to return, though none be-
lieved but in an imminent restoration of their country's
fortunes. The effect of this wholesale emigration on
Poland was disastrous, and it was not till a new genera-
tion arose that the country regained full command of all
its moral and mental powers. Yet it was under these
restless and unsettled conditions, exiled from their homes,
in the soul-destroying atmosphere of recrimination and
regret, that the three greatest Polish poets, Mickiewicz,
Slowacki, and Krasinski, carried out their greatest work.
Mickiewicz, conscious not only that he had lost his
country for ever, but that the life and society of his
country as he had known them were a thing of the past,
determined to immortalize them while he could. He
wrote his great national epic, ' Pan Tadeusz ' (' Mr. Thad-
deus '), in which he telephotographed his mother-country
Lithuania, its forests and the beasts that roamed in
them, the life the people led there in the early nineteenth
century, had led there for centuries past, their petty
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? 28 POLISH LITERATURE
quarrels about boundaries, resulting in hand-to-hand en-
counters, their bouts of hunting and drinking, dancing
and talking, love-making and mushroom-gathering, their
patriarchal etiquette, their splendid hospitality, their
manners homely yet courteous, their conversation down-
right but full of wit, their dress, their cuisine, their
houses and their habits, their rising and their going to
bed. Without idealization and without sentimentality,
without hero and without heroine, with a sense of humour
remarkable for the age, this epic is unique and great
amongst those of all literatures ; it is of local, national,
not of universal Homeric dimensions, but it is historical,
vivid, and spontaneous, inspired by profound and sincere
patriotism, by the wish to crystallize for his compatriots
the life in their patria which he and they had known,
which was no more. It is the bitter lament of one who
has lost his country, whose air and water, forests and
fields, soil and people he had touched and loved, could
still see and smell from afar, but never more regain.
Combining the fervent earnestness, the stubborn
affection of the sober Lithuanian, with the imagination
and feeling, the verve and mobility, the patriotism and
devotion of the Pole, Mickiewicz is in contrast to the
two purely Polish poets, Slowacki and Krasinski. Slo-
wacki, who spent his whole life in the cause of his
art, a much greater master of language than Mickiewicz,
and of much loftier aspirations, was eclipsed during
his lifetime by the more obvious attractiveness, the
more tangible charm of his rival, but his themes of
universal, Shakespearian dimensions, his mastery of
form and refinement of language, his wealth of ideas
and imagination, have entitled him to a posthumous
glory greater than that of Mickiewicz. His romantic
love of the morbid, of accumulating horrors on horror's
head, his want of dramatic feeling and total lack of
humour, are redeemed by his sincerity and nobility,
by his enthusiasm for, and his perfection in his art.
Krasinski again had nothing in common with art for
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POLISH LITERATURE
art's sake; he commanded his language and conjured
with it, but he appeared as a prophet and evangelist,
rather than as an artist. Reflective and thoughtful, he
was an optimist and idealist, who believed in the regene-
ration of mankind and the salvation of the world. A
devout Catholic and stanch conservative, he resisted
the wave of mysticism and spiritualism which had
engulfed Mickiewicz and Slowacki, in which, with all
its impedimenta of necromancy, pow-wows and bogey-
worship, Polish society in exile sought to drown its
despair, as society in Russia does to-day.
Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski, the three giants
of Polish Literature of the first half of the nineteenth
century, two of whom did all their writing, while the
third, Mickiewicz, composed his greatest work, abroad,
overshadowed not only all other writers of the emigra-
tion, but also for a long time those who claimed attention
in the home-country.
With the unparalleled development and inexhaustible
variety of Polish literature in Poland in the second half
of the nineteenth century, it. is impossible to deal here,
for time does not permit. Resigned, though far from
reconciled to fate, the Poles have indemnified themselves
for their political atrophy by the cultivation of art. The
life of the people past and present is mirrored, the torch
of nationality is kept alive in the historical novels of
Kraszewski and Sienkiewicz, the peasant-epics of Konop-
nicka and Reymont, while poets, novelists, and dramatists
of the first quality, including Prus,Zeromski, Weysenhoff,
Asnyk,' Tetmajer, Kasprowicz, Wyspianski, Przyby-
szewski, Szymanski, and Sieroszewski, are almost too
numerous to mention.
The sources of inspiration seem never to run dry,
the tree of Polish literature ever sends forth new shoots,
to make those of . other lands appear leaderless and
unshapely; the Holy Alliance buried Poland, but trees
that bear fruit have sprung from the grave, that flourish
like the talipot-palms of the king of Dahomey, each
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? 30 POLISH LITERATURE
planted on the body of a victim, that astonish those who
fancied Poland dead, while the language, supple and
abundant, receptive and retentive, more dignified if less
go-ahead than Czech, more malleable than Russian if
less melodious, impressive with its solemn rhythm
weighing down the penultimate syllable of every word,
offers to any who can command it unfailing pleasure,
infinite reward.
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? OXFORD : HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
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? YC 76296
U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES
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distinguished exponent of Slavonic philology in the
University of Berlin.
The Reformation, however volatile its confessional
influence, was the direct cause of the permanent recog-
nition of Polish as a literary language, and by thus dis-
crediting Latin, which was preparing for a series of
fresh triumphs, fruit of the humanistic movement, rather
took the wind out of the sails of the Renaissance.
But the influences of humanism had already been at
work in Poland, and were betrayed by the elegance of
form and diction, as well as by the nobility of thought,
which the authors of the golden age of Polish literature
displayed when they came to write in the vernacular.
Rey wrote a number of didactic and satiric poems, in
the form of conversations between members of different
classes of society, or under such titles as ' mirror ' and
' true representation ' of contemporary morals, of which
they give a vivid and invaluable picture. These poems
are full of the practical philosophy of the time, which
they sugared with an exquisite coating of language,
rhyme, and rhythm, and seasoned with generous doles
of the racy national humour. A gifted musician and
singer, an inveterate huntsman, an indefatigable bon-
viveur, he was able to enjoy to the full that personal
popularity which these bents assured him amongst his
countrymen, devotees of sociability and sport.
An adept in mundane accomplishments, Rey had also
a more serious side to his nature ; his homilies and
adaptations of the New Testament, written to further
the propaganda of the Reformation, were very widely
read, while their style was so admirable that Rey could
claim to be the founder of Polish prose, no less than the
first writer of original Polish verse.
The greatest poetical talent of the golden age was
that of Kochanowski, the first Polish lyrist, and the
most gifted poet of independent Poland. A traveller in
Italy and France, he had come under the influence of
Ariosto and Ronsard, and was stimulated by their
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? POLISH LITERATURE 17
example to create real poetry in his native language.
He was the first of his countrymen to devote himself
whole-heartedly to his art, to look upon the profession
of a man of letters as an honourable calling, and not
merely as a stepping-stone to preferment. Not a genius,
he had heart and imagination, and infallible taste; his
mind was broad, though not profound, and his artistic
sense was highly developed. He was a humorist and
a classic, able to invest his own compositions with the
grace and proportion of those of Rome and of the
Renaissance. A fervent Christian and faithful Catholic,
he was alive to the faults of the hierarchy and preferred
the calm of country life to participation in the con-
fessional battles of the day.
Besides writing pastoral poems, idylls of village life,
at a time when nature still repelled more than it attracted,
he wrote a drama, which, with a classical subject, was
a transparent allegory of the ominous political infirmity
of his country. His best works were a verse adaptation
of the Psalter, and a series of threnodies, written on the
death of his little girl, full of pathetic and poignant
beauty, ranging from expressions of utter despair to
glimpses of reconciliation with the inevitable.
His aesthetic equilibrium, his perfection of form, his
command of metaphor, and his freedom from the classical
swathing-bands that trammelled the school of Ronsard,
won Kochanowski a shoal of imitators, while main-
taining him high above the level any of them ever
reached.
But this age counted a number of other writers who
struck out lines of their own, and each in his way
acquired distinction and fame : such were Bielski the
historian, who performed, in writing his Universal
History in Polish, a feat without precedent, and one
not paralleled till the nineteenth century; Skarga, the
genius of the pulpit and incomparable leader of the
Jesuits in Poland ; Klonowicz, the citizen poet and
moralist ; Orzechowski, the cultured and gifted polemist,
c
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? i8 POLISH LITERATURE
who became a priest, but conscious that the Church
needed reform waged stubborn war on, amongst other
things, the principle of the celibacy of the clergy, his
supreme disregard for which he aptly illustrated by
courageously marrying a wife ; another character of the
time was Count Zamojski, who founded a university on
his own property in the country, surrounded himself
there with a brilliant coterie of authors and thinkers,
and for long eclipsed the seat of learning in the capital.
Quantities of this sixteenth-century literature have been
lost; printing was expensive, fires were common, but
from what remains it is possible to argue the extra-
ordinary spontaneousness of the intellectual develop-
ment, the prevalence and high level of culture in Poland
at that time; this was due in part, no doubt, to the
humanistic currents which penetrated Poland from Italy,
spread on their return to their country by the innumerable
Poles who visited and studied at Padua and at other
Italian universities, due in part too to the Reformation
which reached Poland from Germany and taught the
Poles the value of prose, just as humanism opened their
eyes to the beauty of poetry in their own language.
Yet credit must be given to the ground on which these
seeds fell, to whose growth Poland lent a character
eminently original. No one could maintain that the
literature of Poland's so-called golden age was a purely
national product; it had produced no real genius, it was
always overshadowed and influenced by the literary
tendencies of other countries. Yet it contained much
that was eminently characteristic of Poland, much that
could not have been produced except under the peculiar
conditions of Polish life, facts that militate against its
successful translation into any foreign language. One
of its healthiest and most gratifying characteristics was
the extraordinary sense of corporate civic responsibility
displayed by almost all its representatives; ardent patriots,
anxious to inculcate into their readers their own sense of
duty, they were never weary of exposing the abuses and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 19
conjuring the defects from which their country suffered.
From Kochanowski in his poems to Skarga in his
sermons, one and all were conscious that Poland was
on the wrong tack, that the ship was already entangled
in the Sargasso sea of anarchy from which it was never
to emerge entire; poets and preachers, historians and
pamphleteers echoed the one cry: we are perishing.
This general sense amongst the intellectual classes of
impending calamity to the State, of Poland's inevitable
doom, at a time when jeremiads were really premature,
when Poland was still compact within and formidable
without, are in all the more creditable contrast to the
blind complacency and criminal optimism characteristic
of Polish society throughout the seventeenth and the
first half of the eighteenth centuries, when the country
was actually tottering to disruption.
By the end of the sixteenth century, it is true, the
extinction of the hereditary dynasty of the Jagiellos had
enabled the team of aristocrats and squires to break
through the last traces of royal control which still held
them in nominal check: the nobles had, by making
kingship elective, robbed it of power ; they had hand-
cuffed the peasants to the soil, confined the citizens to
the cities, and made the tenure of any and every office
conditional on ownership of land; they had, with a
delicious sense of paradox, made unanimity a sine qua
non of all fresh legislation, and so rendered nugatory
every attempt at reform, for unanimity was the one
condition which the Poles, the most urbane, gregarious,
and sociable of people, but always coming to fisticuffs
whenever two or three of them were gathered together
in their country's interest, could never attain.
Yet, in spite of this premiation of individuality, this
organized anarchy or rather panarchy, this distorted
conception of democracy, in spite of the enormous in-
crease of wealth and luxury, the backbone of the nation
had not yet been sapped, victories were reported abroad,
intellectual triumphs celebrated at home, while the exist-
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? 20 . POLISH LITERATURE
ence of self-criticism, though exaggerated, showed that
the national mind was healthy, present and alert.
The history of Polish literature in the seventeenth and
first half of the eighteenth centuries is, in spite of the
appearance of occasional and meteoric talents, character-
ized by stagnation and decay. In contrast to the sixteenth
century, of which the chief features were variety and
originality of talent, perfection of language and indepen-
dence of style, the seventeenth century, the age in Poland
of exaggerated individuality in politics, was one of grey
uniformity of intellectual development. The religious
waywardness of the sixteenth was followed by whole-
sale reversion and unbroken fidelity to the mother-Church
in the seventeenth century. The number of people who
took part in literature reached amazing proportions,
but few acquired positions of distinction or command.
Always gifted orators, the Poles now spent their time
in justifying and preserving the disorder by which their
country was distracted, and in defending the miscon-
ceived liberty in which the minority throve, the political
assemblies were flooded with eloquence, society with
endless streams of poetry religious and political, lyric
and historical, epic, didactic, romantic, erotic and pas-
toral, while the air of the cities was filled with quips
and squibs, lampoons and pasquinades. The growing
mania for crests and connections, for heraldry and
genealogy, which grew in importance as great charac-
ters became more rare, for baroque panegyrics, which
became more voluminous in proportion as there was
less to extol, all pointed to intellectual deterioration.
Latin regained ground it had lost, while the habit of
latinizing Polish prose became incurable a style later
dubbed maccaroniism ; linguistic purity was only pre-
served in poetry and in the pulpit.
The people, bemused with easy living, benumbed
with verse and oratory, were yet startled by occasional
and unexpected triumphs in the field, but the endless
wars with Sweden and Turkey, who should have been
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? POLISH LITERATURE 21
Poland's best friends, exhausted the scattered forces of
the country, and prepared the way for the really danger-
ous enemies, Russia and Prussia, unappreciated because
so near at hand, already sharpening their claws in anti-
cipation of the feast.
During the reigns of the Saxon kings in the first half
of the eighteenth century the culture of Polish society
reached its lowest level. Poland, which had always
been behind but had in the beginning of the seven-
teenth century begun to catch up the rest of Europe,
drifted further and further out of the stream of civiliza-
tion. Poland had proclaimed religious tolerance in the
sixteenth century, when the Christians of the rest of
Europe were torturing one another for their beliefs, but
as time went on, became more and more intolerant.
The eighteenth century was in Poland characterized by
religious unity and intellectual monotony. Fighting
and husbandry occupied the people more than art and
literature, while conviviality and the chase filled their
leisure hours. What literature there was, continued on
the same lines ; the vogue of poetry increased when in
the rest of Europe its place was being taken by prose.
Letters became a pastime instead of a profession, little
was published, so carelessness of style resulted, corre-
spondence was carried on in verse, while circumstantial
poems appeared by the hundred and would be occa-
sioned by the most trivial events, a divorce or an
execution. Innumerable panegyrics continued to gratify
the morbid love of heraldry and genealogy ; books of
devotional poetry and of ascetic character multiplied
incessantly, while the more prominent position occupied
by women in society manifested itself in the debut of
numerous authoresses.
Meantime the organized political anarchy, symbolized
in the phrase 'A Pole in his castle's as strong as a
king', and cunningly guaranteed by the neighbouring
powers, resulted in the luxuriant omnipotence of the
great nobles, too selfish and jealous of each other to
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? 22 POLISH LITERATURE
promote or even to permit any reform, in the impoveriza-
tion of the towns and the oppression of the peasants.
Poland was like a garden where none of the fruit-
trees had ever been pruned, whose hundred branches,
unable to submit to the curtailment of a single privilege,
had passed beyond all control ; their exuberant growth
would ever and again produce splendid attitudes and
lines, effects of colour or of shape the more startlingly
picturesque because unorthodox and unprecedented,
which, however, not only overshadowed and devitalized
the rest of the flora, and reduced the gardener to ridicule
and despair, but excited the prejudice and brought
about the officious interference of the neighbours.
These perceived that the continued existence in their
midst of this seminary of liberty, this democratic wilder-
ness, this happy hunting-ground of individual caprice
would mar the tidiness of their own spick-and-span
properties and prevent the consolidation of their harden-
ing autocracies, that on the other hand its distribution
amongst themselves would be a smart piece of business.
So they set to work, their appetite increased as they
ate, till by the end of the century the three empires had
met, and the Polish Commonwealth was no more.
To these facts the society of this chevaleresque
republic awoke when it was too late. With the acces-
sion of the last king of Poland, Stanislas Augustus
Poniatowski, a man as cultured and sprightly as the
Saxon kings had been ponderous and dull, a great
revival of intellectual activity, inspired by the conscious-
ness of imminent ruin, had begun ; but the centre of
political gravity was no longer in Warsaw, it was in
Berlin, the realization of the national danger was post-
humous, and reform of the State no longer possible at
home, because dismemberment had been decided on
abroad.
Filled with the sense of this tragedy, the loss of
political independence, all the more bitter because long
prepared, Polish society had recourse to education and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 23
literature to save what it still could. Under the in-
fluence of French culture, then predominant in Europe,
the complete rehabilitation of the Polish language, in
prose as well as in verse, was finally effected. In the
field of history much lost time had to be made good,
and the King, genuinely interested in the promotion of
literature, was especially energetic in his support of the
historian Naruszewicz. The stage, which had never
been a favourite diversion of the Poles, at length be-
came relatively popular under the direction of the play-
wright Niemcewicz, who took contemporary politics
and morals as the theme of his comedies. The greatest
poet of the age was Krasicki, Bishop of Warmia, the
first since Rey and Kochanowski, excepting Potocki in
the seventeenth century, to make letters his profession
out of love for them and for his country, not from mo-
tives of personal interest.
The bitterness of his satires he mellowed with modera-
tion and indulgence, they were distinguished by objec-
tive sense of humour rather than by subjective irony,
and in an age of shameless corruption he never became
cynical. His stores of invention and observation were
copious, his wit was recognized by his monarch, whom
in his turn he delighted to compliment. Like King
Stanislas, he was unconscious of the political necessi-
ties of the time, and missed the political moment, but
like him he did his best to enlighten his countrymen,
lest political be followed by intellectual captivity. His
lucid thoughts were expressed, except for occasional
relapses into eighteenth-century rococo, concisely and
with admirable precision of diction, while he was master
both of style and of form.
After the declaration of the freedom of the press in
1789 the country, which in spite of its ostensible liberty
had never had any newspapers, was inundated with
political literature. Economic and political rights were
won for the towns by the eminent publicist Kollontaj.
The Education Commission and Society of the Friends
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? 24 POLISH LITERATURE
of Science in Warsaw both developed hectic but invalu-
able activity, to which the valorous maintenance of
intellectual independence in the nineteenth century, in
spite of calamity on calamity in the field of politics, can
be directly traced. Men of fortune, for the first time
alive to the wealth of their own literature, were seized
with bibliomania, and none too soon ; for much was
already lost, and little space remained to save what was
left. To appreciate the meaning of the partition of
Poland it is necessary to imagine America in possession
of Ireland, and Great Britain divided between France
and Germany, to imagine books and newspapers pub-
lished in the South of England prohibited in the rest of
the kingdom, and all English schools and universities
North of the Trent abolished, in Ireland none but
Americans qualified to buy land, and in Scotland, the
North and Midlands only Germans allowed to build
houses. Under these circumstances it would be com-
prehensible that all who cared for their country should
turn their attention to education and literature, the only
means of maintaining intellectual independence, and of
keeping the flame of nationality alive. It is this dire
need that inspired the great Polish poets of the nine-
teenth century, this consciousness that their literature
occupies a unique place amongst those of Europe, for
while in other countries literature is but one of the
factors of the national life, in Poland it and the language
in which it is expressed are the bond that still keeps the
disjected fragments of the people morally united, are
the one sanctuary where expressions of national feeling
may still take refuge and that not always.
The extraordinarily spontaneous and prolific revival
which took place in the second half of the eighteenth
century came to a sudden end in 1795 ; what with the
completion of the partition, the establishment of censor-
ships, the French Revolution, the defeat of Austria and
Germany by Napoleon, his campaign against Russia,
and all the hopes and fears which these kaleidoscopic
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? POLISH LITERATURE 25
changes generated amongst the Poles, the times were
too harassing and troublous to permit people reading
anything but despatches and gazettes. After Moscow
and Waterloo, when the hopes of the resuscitation of
Poland had been disappointed, Warsaw, in the centre
of the largest and most prosperous of the three divisions
into which the country had been cut up, again became
the national focus, the literary cynosure. Posen was
too detached and commercial ; Galicia, before Magenta
and Solferino, Sadowa and Koeniggraetz had taught
Austria of what she was made, still abandoned to the
caprice of Vienna, was then, in contrast to the present
day, a sort of Polish backwoods. But the revival that
took place in Warsaw was, for the moment, only an
aftermath of what had gone before ; the eighteenth
century and its criteria had vanished from Western
Europe, but continued in Poland to lead a peaceful
backwater existence, with its paraphernalia of powdered
shepherdesses, periwigs and minuets.
Only one remarkable talent stands out from this
rather monotonous background, that of the comedian
Count Fredro. He began his career in Lemberg, but
soon moved to and settled in the more responsive
atmosphere of Warsaw. Careless of his themes and
their development, he was unsurpassed in his handling
of witty dialogue, and his aphorisms are household
words to-day wherever Polish is spoken. Besides
highly amusing farces, a historical comedy and melo-
dramas, he achieved great success with his character^
comedies, in which the Lovelaces and shrews, prigs and
xenomaniacs, misers and grumblers, though inspired by
foreign models, are all impregnated with downright
Polish spirit, which appears not only in their speech,
but in their thoughts and actions, reckless and incon-
sequent, good-humoured and urbane, witty and to the
point, receptive and alert.
This period is also characterized by a general seculari-
zation and democratization of literature, panegyrics
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? 26 POLISH LITERATURE
became obsolete, there was no court, and therefore no
court poets, the vogue of moralizing and didactic poems
had gone, and literature became a profession instead of
a pastime, from being a distraction became a necessity.
And now even the most inveterate classics could no
longer anaesthetize their senses to the vibrations of
romanticism which Scott and Byron, Goethe and
Schiller were transmitting over Europe. The stereo-
typed repetitions of classical models could no longer
satisfy the craving for the novel, the individual, the
national, the supernatural, the romantic. In supplying
this demand Lithuania was to play to Poland the part
of Scotland to England ; Lithuania, like Scotland, had
furnished the neighbouring country with its dynasty
and its territory, a fact which was never allowed to be
forgotten, and was now, remoter and wilder than Poland,
with a polonized upper but untouched lower class, to
supply not only material for romance, but Poland's
greatest writer himself, Mickiewicz. A native of Black
Russia, on the borders of Lithuania, he spent a normal
childhood at home and passed through Vilna University.
His first poems, a book of ballads and romances
published in 1822, erotic in character, were partly
occasioned by a disappointment of the affections, and
by their marked vein of personality and introspection,
a novelty in Polish letters, at once aroused comment.
This was followed by a more ambitious work, ' Dziady '
(' The grandfathers '), a fantastic drama in a popular
framework, with a background of Lithuanian and White
Russian folk-lore, and all the essential adjuncts of
Romanticism, a work which, full of splendid episodes,
lacks unity. One of his finest lyrical outbursts is the
' Ode to Youth ', a challenge of triumphant youth, all-
pervading and all-conquering, to ossifying routine and
humdrum worldliness. His inspiration was sincere
and profound, his instinct and taste infallible, his per-
sonality passionate and convincing, while his language
was novel, daring, and polychrome; his facility and
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? POLISH LITERATURE 27
versatility baffled a thousand imitators, and bewildered
the criticasters of Warsaw. He visited Petersburg and
Moscow, where he imbibed experience and was made
much of in society; from Odessa, where he was sent
to teach, he brought back a series of oriental cameo-
sonnets descriptive of land- and sea-scape, wreck and
storm, sunshine and colour, joy and sorrow in the
Crimea, that called forth general amazement and ad-
miration. Another dramatic poem, ' Konrad Wallen-
rod/ celebrated the cunning triumph in the middle
ages of Lithuanian patriotism over the aggressive
Teutonic Knights, and though of unequal propor-
tions, contains numberless details of perfect workman-
ship. He went abroad in 1829 and never returned to
his country, which in two years from then was over-
taken by the consequences of the ill-judged and fatal
revolution of 1831. What had been left of Polish liberty
was swept away, and ten thousand of the flower of the
nation went into voluntary exile in France, without lay-
ing down their arms, never to return, though none be-
lieved but in an imminent restoration of their country's
fortunes. The effect of this wholesale emigration on
Poland was disastrous, and it was not till a new genera-
tion arose that the country regained full command of all
its moral and mental powers. Yet it was under these
restless and unsettled conditions, exiled from their homes,
in the soul-destroying atmosphere of recrimination and
regret, that the three greatest Polish poets, Mickiewicz,
Slowacki, and Krasinski, carried out their greatest work.
Mickiewicz, conscious not only that he had lost his
country for ever, but that the life and society of his
country as he had known them were a thing of the past,
determined to immortalize them while he could. He
wrote his great national epic, ' Pan Tadeusz ' (' Mr. Thad-
deus '), in which he telephotographed his mother-country
Lithuania, its forests and the beasts that roamed in
them, the life the people led there in the early nineteenth
century, had led there for centuries past, their petty
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? 28 POLISH LITERATURE
quarrels about boundaries, resulting in hand-to-hand en-
counters, their bouts of hunting and drinking, dancing
and talking, love-making and mushroom-gathering, their
patriarchal etiquette, their splendid hospitality, their
manners homely yet courteous, their conversation down-
right but full of wit, their dress, their cuisine, their
houses and their habits, their rising and their going to
bed. Without idealization and without sentimentality,
without hero and without heroine, with a sense of humour
remarkable for the age, this epic is unique and great
amongst those of all literatures ; it is of local, national,
not of universal Homeric dimensions, but it is historical,
vivid, and spontaneous, inspired by profound and sincere
patriotism, by the wish to crystallize for his compatriots
the life in their patria which he and they had known,
which was no more. It is the bitter lament of one who
has lost his country, whose air and water, forests and
fields, soil and people he had touched and loved, could
still see and smell from afar, but never more regain.
Combining the fervent earnestness, the stubborn
affection of the sober Lithuanian, with the imagination
and feeling, the verve and mobility, the patriotism and
devotion of the Pole, Mickiewicz is in contrast to the
two purely Polish poets, Slowacki and Krasinski. Slo-
wacki, who spent his whole life in the cause of his
art, a much greater master of language than Mickiewicz,
and of much loftier aspirations, was eclipsed during
his lifetime by the more obvious attractiveness, the
more tangible charm of his rival, but his themes of
universal, Shakespearian dimensions, his mastery of
form and refinement of language, his wealth of ideas
and imagination, have entitled him to a posthumous
glory greater than that of Mickiewicz. His romantic
love of the morbid, of accumulating horrors on horror's
head, his want of dramatic feeling and total lack of
humour, are redeemed by his sincerity and nobility,
by his enthusiasm for, and his perfection in his art.
Krasinski again had nothing in common with art for
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POLISH LITERATURE
art's sake; he commanded his language and conjured
with it, but he appeared as a prophet and evangelist,
rather than as an artist. Reflective and thoughtful, he
was an optimist and idealist, who believed in the regene-
ration of mankind and the salvation of the world. A
devout Catholic and stanch conservative, he resisted
the wave of mysticism and spiritualism which had
engulfed Mickiewicz and Slowacki, in which, with all
its impedimenta of necromancy, pow-wows and bogey-
worship, Polish society in exile sought to drown its
despair, as society in Russia does to-day.
Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski, the three giants
of Polish Literature of the first half of the nineteenth
century, two of whom did all their writing, while the
third, Mickiewicz, composed his greatest work, abroad,
overshadowed not only all other writers of the emigra-
tion, but also for a long time those who claimed attention
in the home-country.
With the unparalleled development and inexhaustible
variety of Polish literature in Poland in the second half
of the nineteenth century, it. is impossible to deal here,
for time does not permit. Resigned, though far from
reconciled to fate, the Poles have indemnified themselves
for their political atrophy by the cultivation of art. The
life of the people past and present is mirrored, the torch
of nationality is kept alive in the historical novels of
Kraszewski and Sienkiewicz, the peasant-epics of Konop-
nicka and Reymont, while poets, novelists, and dramatists
of the first quality, including Prus,Zeromski, Weysenhoff,
Asnyk,' Tetmajer, Kasprowicz, Wyspianski, Przyby-
szewski, Szymanski, and Sieroszewski, are almost too
numerous to mention.
The sources of inspiration seem never to run dry,
the tree of Polish literature ever sends forth new shoots,
to make those of . other lands appear leaderless and
unshapely; the Holy Alliance buried Poland, but trees
that bear fruit have sprung from the grave, that flourish
like the talipot-palms of the king of Dahomey, each
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? 30 POLISH LITERATURE
planted on the body of a victim, that astonish those who
fancied Poland dead, while the language, supple and
abundant, receptive and retentive, more dignified if less
go-ahead than Czech, more malleable than Russian if
less melodious, impressive with its solemn rhythm
weighing down the penultimate syllable of every word,
offers to any who can command it unfailing pleasure,
infinite reward.
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? OXFORD : HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
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? YC 76296
U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES
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